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/ 10 September 2006

Suicide bomber kills Afghan provincial governor

A suicide bomber assassinated an Afghan provincial governor on Sunday, as Nato said it killed almost 100 more Taliban fighters in its biggest offensive against the resurgent Islamist group. Governor Hakim Taniwal, a former mines minister who once lectured in an Australian university, is the first provincial chief killed since the Taliban fell five years ago.

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/ 10 September 2006

Coca-Cola plant opened in Kabul

President Hamid Karzai Sunday formally opened a $25-million Coca-Cola bottling plant, one of the most significant investments in Afghanistan since the ousting of the Taliban five years ago. Karzai said it was an endorsement of the government’s efforts to push ahead with reconstruction of the war-damaged country.

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/ 5 July 2006

The elderly go where many fear to tread

Simone Thibaudeau hates boring holidays and Claude Fievet loves Central Asia. So when they were invited on a package tour of Afghanistan, the woman of 73 and the man of 80 did not hesitate. In a Kabul hotel after three weeks in the north of a country that is more associated with war than tourism, they were tired but inspired.

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/ 20 June 2006

Bumper crop foils war on drugs

The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world’s heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the Western-funded war on narcotics. British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual United Nations poppy survey.

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/ 31 May 2006

‘Troops in Afghanistan fired in self-defence’

The United States-led coalition in Afghanistan said on Wednesday an initial investigation showed that troops opened fire in "self-defence" this week after a deadly traffic accident set off widespread rioting. Afghan officials had told the coalition that 20 people were killed and 160 wounded in the accident and subsequent rioting that engulfed the city on Monday.

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/ 6 May 2006

US helicopter crashes in Afghanistan, 10 soldiers killed

A United States helicopter involved in an anti-Taliban combat operation crashed in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, killing all 10 US soldiers on board, the US military said on Saturday. The crash of the Chinook in Kunar province late on Friday was another blow to coalition forces in Afghanistan after a bomb killed two Italian soldiers near the capital the same day.

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/ 1 March 2006

Bush in surprise Afghan visit

United States President George Bush arrived in Afghanistan on Wednesday for his first visit since US-led forces toppled the Taliban regime in 2001. Bush made the surprise stopover, landing at the US military base at Bagram, north of Kabul, as he headed to India to begin a maiden trip to South Asia

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/ 10 February 2006

Two SA men nabbed for heroin smuggling in Kabul

Police arrested two South African nationals trying to leave Afghanistan’s main airport with two kilograms of heroin hidden in a photo album, an official said on Friday. The men, carrying doctored South African passports, were trying to fly to China on Thursday, airport police chief Aminaullah Khan told Agence France-Presse.

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/ 8 November 2005

Destitute Afghanistan opens luxurious hotel

President Hamid Karzai officially opened the most luxurious hotel in destitute Afghanistan on Tuesday, with the five-star Kabul Serena touted as a means to lure investors and dollar-spending tourists. The $36,5-million hotel, opposite the heavily fortified presidential palace, is an almost-total overhaul of the once-famous Kabul Hotel that was badly damaged in the 1992-1996 civil war.

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/ 14 September 2005

Karzai faces uphill battle to tame Afghan Parliament

Less than a year after winning Afghanistan’s first presidential vote, Hamid Karzai will have to curb the power of warlords and opium kingpins who are likely to be elected to the nation’s new Parliament. Karzai has stamped his authority outside the capital in the past 11 months by taming some of the most powerful former mujahedin commanders, giving them central government positions to weaken their regional power bases.

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/ 20 June 2005

Afghanistan foils plot to assassinate US ambassador

Afghan intelligence officials have thwarted a plot to assassinate US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and arrested three Pakistanis armed with rocket propelled grenades and assault rifles, a spokesperson for President Hamid Karzai said on Monday. Two senior Afghan officials said the men had confessed to their crimes and said they were in Afghanistan ”to fight jihad.”

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/ 30 May 2005

Bicycle bomb wounds seven Afghans

A bicycle bomb aimed at a vehicle carrying Nao-led peacekeepers exploded on Monday east of the Afghan capital Kabul, wounding at least seven Afghan civilians, some seriously, police and officials said. The remote-controlled bomb was set on a bicycle left on the side of the main road from Kabul to the eastern city of Jalalabad and detonated at about 9.30am.

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/ 3 May 2005

Afghan clerics plan ‘Mullah’ TV station

Radical Afghan clerics on Tuesday unveiled plans to launch the country’s first Islamic television channel since the fall of the fundamentalist Taliban regime. A group of hardline religious scholars, or mullahs, said the station would counter what they say are immoral and un-Islamic programmes being broadcast by other channels.

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/ 29 March 2005

Homes wiped out as Afghan dam bursts

A dam ruptured in southern Afghanistan early on Tuesday, unleashing floods that killed at least six people and washed away hundreds of houses and shops, the provincial governor said. The United States military sent Black Hawk helicopters to help with rescue operations after the Bandi Sultan dam burst.

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/ 21 March 2005

Floods kill nearly 200 in Afghanistan

United States military helicopters airlifted stranded families to safety and aid agencies distributed vital food after devastating floods in Afghanistan left nearly 200 people dead, officials said on Monday. Torrents of melting snow and fierce rains caused rivers to burst their banks in many parts of the poverty-stricken country.

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/ 18 February 2005

Afghanistan’s children freeze to death

Aid workers in Afghanistan said on Friday they feared up to 1 000 children may have died from cold and malnutrition during severe winter weather affecting the west of the war-shattered country. Western Ghor province has been hit hard by snowstorms in Afghanistan’s worst winter for more than a decade and most of the province remains out of reach of humanitarian aid.

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/ 4 February 2005

Passenger jet goes missing in Afghanistan

Afghan and Nato forces launched a ground and air search on Friday for an Afghan passenger jet carrying 104 people after it disappeared from radar screens during a snowstorm near the mountain-ringed capital. The Kam Air Boeing 737-200 took off on Thursday afternoon from the western Afghan city of Herat, bound for Kabul.

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/ 9 December 2004

Karzai turns attention to drug trade

Only two days after his inauguration, President Hamid Karzai is already trying to get the message out — Afghanistan needs to stem its booming drugs trade if the country is going to move forward. With the ink barely dry after his swearing in, Karzai has called a two-day meeting of tribal elders and provincial officials from around Afghanistan to discuss strategies to combat the drugs trade.

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/ 28 October 2004

Three UN workers kidnapped in Afghanistan

Armed men wearing military-style jackets abducted three foreign United Nations election workers in broad daylight in Kabul on Thursday as vote-counting ended in Afghanistan’s landmark election. A group calling itself the Army of Muslims claimed responsibility, Arabic satellite television station Al-Jazeera reported.

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/ 8 October 2004

Rockets fired, bomb found ahead of poll

Rockets rained on Afghan cities and military posts and a huge truck bomb was seized as the war-weary nation prepared for Saturday’s presidential elections. The embassy district in the capital, Kabul, was among the targets as more than two dozen rockets were fired around the country in a 24-hour period, a spokesman for the United States-led coalition said.

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/ 31 August 2004

Afghan capital braces for more attacks

The FBI on Tuesday took over the probe into the weekend bombing of a United States security firm in Kabul as the Afghan capital braced for further potential attacks in the run-up to the country’s landmark presidential election. At least nine people were killed and dozens injured in Sunday’s blast.

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/ 30 August 2004

At least 16 killed in two blasts in Afghanistan

The United States government warned its citizens to keep a low profile on Monday after a car bomb hit a private US security firm in the Afghan capital, killing at least seven people, including two Americans. The Taliban claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack on the office of Dyncorp, which provides bodyguards for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and works for the American government in Iraq.

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/ 30 June 2004

Twin blasts hit Afghan city

Twenty-seven people, including children, were injured on Wednesday in two explosions that rocked a city in eastern Afghanistan, officials said. The bombs hit shortly after 1pm local time in the eastern city of Jalalabad.”There were two explosions, both at security posts,” provincial military corps official Agha Jan said.